Nikolai Krylenko - People's Commissar of Justice

People's Commissar of Justice

In 1931 he became Commissar of Justice and Prosecutor General of the RSFSR, in which capacity he served as the chief prosecutor at the Moscow show trials of the 1920s and the early 1930s and was widely seen as the public face of the Soviet justice system. Krylenko stepped down as Prosecutor General in 1932 and was replaced by Andrei Vyshinsky. In 1933, he was awarded the Order of Lenin. In January 1933, waxed indignant about the leniency of some Soviet officials who objected to the infamous "five ears law":

We are sometimes up against a flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People's Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we're up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mother's milk... a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party's political guidlines but with considerations of "higher justice".

From 1927 to 1934, Krylenko was a member of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party.